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Kindle Connects to Library E-Books

For years the availability of free e-books from libraries was something of an underground secret.

But Amazon significantly increased the potential visibility of library e-books on Wednesday when it opened up its popular Kindle device to these books for the first time.

“Libraries are a critical part of our communities,” Jay Marine, director of Kindle at Amazon, said in a statement. “And we’re excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country.”

The introduction of the Kindle, the biggest-selling e-reader, opens up library e-books to a wider audience, heightening the fears of publishers that many customers will turn to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits.

Library e-books are already available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, smartphones, laptops and other devices, but never on the Kindle, whose users had long complained that they were left out.

The move by Amazon “is a big deal and it’s a big step forward in public libraries being much more central in the whole e-book growth,” said Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries and schools. Connecting libraries with the Kindle, the most successful device and the largest e-book bookseller in the business, “is going to bring millions of readers to the public library,” he said.

The publishing industry has been reluctant to criticize libraries and their e-book systems because of the cherished status libraries hold in communities. But some publishing executives said privately that they found the development troubling and were concerned it might lead to a further unraveling of the traditional sales model.

As e-books have taken off with readers, libraries have been building their e-book collections to meet demand, successfully persuading many publishers to sell their titles to libraries in e-book format.

Christopher Platt, the director of collections and circulating operations at the New York Public Library, said that to meet demand from Kindle users, the library has already moved more money into the e-book budget and changed its default lending period for e-books from three weeks to two weeks.

“This is massive for libraries,” Mr. Platt said. “It opens up another avenue of access to the collections that we already have.”

From January to September the number of e-books checked out increased by 75 percent over the same period last year, he added.

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About 67 percent of libraries nationally offer access to e-books, up 12 percent from two years ago, according to the American Library Association. Most libraries work through OverDrive, which acts as a middleman between publishers and libraries.

There are usually rules attached to checking out e-books. Publishers have said that libraries must treat digital collections the same way they treat physical collections: if a library buys 10 copies of a certain book, for instance, then only 10 copies can be digitally checked out at one time.

Library patrons appreciate not having to visit a physical library to access e-books, which can be downloaded remotely from home or on the road.

That convenience has publishers worried that e-reader owners who used to buy digital books will begin instead to borrow them. At least two of the six major publishers, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, do not make their e-books available to libraries.

“Our e-books are not currently available in libraries because we haven’t yet found a business model with which we are comfortable and that we feel properly addresses the long-term interests of our authors,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster. “We are in an ongoing dialogue with our library customers, and holding meetings with the different vendors who are offering e-book distribution to libraries, so that we can stay abreast of all the possible options.”

Publishers have also learned that once they have established e-book guidelines, changing them risks incurring the wrath of libraries. In March HarperCollins infuriated some librarians when it began enforcing a new restriction on its e-books, requiring that a book be checked out no more than 26 times before it expired. Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said on Wednesday that there had been no change in the policy.

Demand for library e-books will increase, publishing analysts said. Forrester Research estimated that roughly 15 million e-readers would be purchased in the United States this year.

A recent study by the Codex Group revealed that the idea of downloading e-books from a library was “phenomenally popular” among owners of digital reading devices, said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market-research company.